Pushnote, genius but forgettable?

Now, first things first, Pushnote is genius! This is one of those apps that you can’t believe hasn’t already been created. I first picked up on it when Stephen Fry pushed (pardon the pun) it on his blog, he’s a British comedian and member of the Twitterati (over 2 million followers) who has a vested interest in the startup (as an investor).

When you sign up for Pushnote, you are asked to install a browser plugin, I believe they have currently created plugins for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer (lacking support for Apple’s Safari).

Once installed, you’ll notice their logo placed in your browser toolbar, clicking on this will bring up a kind of chat dialog. So essentially what this service allows you to do is chat about any web page on the internet with anyone else. It was fun at first to see what was going on, but you quickly notice a pattern;

An absurd amount of meaningless Stephen Fry chat.
People commenting that they’re inside your Gmail, Twitter, Facebook etc.
Enjoying the novelty of it a little too much.

I can see this being useful, but to be honest, I’ve had it installed for a few days and forget it exists 99% of the time and when I do remember, I’m not on a site that anyone is commenting about. If everyone was using this it would be great, but at the moment, people are only pointlessly commenting on the big sites. Another problem is you wouldn’t notice when you are on a site that’s being commented on because the only difference is the icon turns from grey to green, which is hard to spot unless you’re constantly checking. Most importantly of all, it stays green, so there’s no way of telling if the page has new comments or comments you’ve already seen.

Great idea and good implementation, but to become worth using, the implementation needs to be incredible.